InSAR and Earth Observation techniques for infrastructure (C805)

Earth Observation (EO) encompasses an extremely broad suite of technologies that have come of age over the past 15 years and are expanding into a new era of cloud processing, very high resolution and near real-time service delivery. Technological improvements have brought spaceborne EO data products to the point where their spatial and temporal resolutions are of immediate relevance and benefit to the infrastructure community. Infrastructure asset stakeholders can now make use of the globally available cost-effective spaceborne solutions to address their need to map, measure and monitor multi-scale, rapidly changing and spatially complex assets of all kinds. To fully capitalise on these EO solutions, their benefits and the necessary steps for their uptake need to be clear and readily understandable to the asset owner, ie access and adoption need to be as easy and practicable as possible. These guidelines are aimed at improving accessibility to EO technology by providing an understanding of techniques and products, as applied to infrastructure management. They do this through descriptions of data products and techniques (with some mathematical definitions), detailed methods tables, and explanations in a series of illustrated case studies that have been provided by several contributing organisations. Not all EO techniques and products are dealt with here; only those of most relevance to infrastructure are included, and links are provided to further, more in-depth reading for those who want and require it. The guidelines also include some high-level information that explains the processes and decisions involved in planning and executing an infrastructure project; it explains the important considerations at each stage, and provides a critical evaluation and lessons learnt during actual application.